Come Out. Come Down. Come Back. Being Ellen.

By Jesse Green

Published: August 19, 2001

Among the many moves that have constituted Ellen DeGeneres's life, one stands out as the most difficult, at least until recently. She was 16. Previously, her sad caravan of a family had merely relocated within New Orleans every few years, each time just one or two neighborhoods away, though still far enough to require Ellen to negotiate a new school and assemble a new set of friends. All of which she did smoothly: she was a fitter-inner who read the social map compulsively and knew how to find her place on it. But this move was different. Her mother, having divorced Ellen's father and remarried, was taking Ellen to live with her in Atlanta, Tex.: 300 miles away, population 6,000, so different in scale and style from New Orleans that it must have seemed the Big Uneasy.

''Do you remember Hot Sox?'' DeGeneres asks now, as we sit in the living room of what may be house No. 25. ''They were really high and had sparkles and glitter and were popular -- this would be the early 70's. I had a ton of them. And I remember looking at all of them and thinking: I'm going to a place where they have gun racks on the back of the pickup trucks, and the girlfriend's name in iridescent letters spelled out above it, and I just have to get rid of anything weird. So I gave it all away.''

DeGeneres, 43, couldn't look less weird today, wearing faded jeans and a plain white shirt, sitting cross-legged but straight-spined on a chocolate brown sofa. Other than the clunky Tag Heuer watch weighing down her left wrist, she seems unencumbered, physically, as if she might float up to the ceiling on a cloud of pheromones. And yet something in the familiar eyes -- cat's-eye blue, bright and wary -- makes her look more determined than enthusiastic, as if she were preparing for yet another

move. As if she would always be preparing for yet another move.

Of course, her moves are much more public now than they were in 1972, as is her success (or failure) at fitting in. How well she fares on CBS -- where her new sitcom, ''The Ellen Show,'' makes its debut next month -- is already a hot topic among TV previewers, whose forecasts range from ''most promising'' to ''it won't last as long as 'Bette.' '' Her personal life is just as public. Since the infamy of her first series, ''Ellen,'' and the dual coming-out of its title character and star in April 1997, her every move, however intimate, has excited the press. And though she mocked this attention in a recent stand-up bit whose punch line, to the extent that her bits have punch lines, was the tabloid headline ''Lesbian Demands Cheese,'' even she admits that to some extent she brought the scrutiny on herself -- by making a political stand in an entertainment medium and by not backing down from it even when ''Ellen'' started hemorrhaging viewers. But to some extent, she was no more in control of what happened than the passengers on that bus in ''Speed,'' which had either to race on forever or blow up.

DeGeneres's bus blew up, and everybody was watching. Whoever was most at fault for what happened, the public scrutiny reversed the usual pattern of her moves, transforming her from the map-reader into the map itself, read compulsively by others: as an icon for lesbians, a hero for gay men, a whipping girl for social conservatives (Jerry Falwell called her ''Ellen

Degenerate'') and a cautionary tale for other celebrities. It also turned the tables by making her the person forever emblazoned with a girlfriend's name in iridescent letters. Not her current girlfriend, a photographer who doesn't particularly seek the limelight, but the one before, the actress who carelessly lighted the match of America's first lesbian self-immolation.

Anne Heche, wraithlike, still hovers closely about DeGeneres's public image, in part because of their fantasy Hollywood romance (they met at an Oscar party a month before the coming-out episode) and in part because of their nightmare Hollywood split three and a half years later. Does anyone not know that on the day the breakup hit the papers last August, Heche showed up at a stranger's house near Fresno, babbling and half-dressed? That she subsequently became engaged to a cameraman who had worked with her on a documentary about DeGeneres? The comedian herself, known for her rambling, switchback stories, couldn't have written a more convoluted (or painful) denouement. It was, after all, Heche (along with ABC, which canceled ''Ellen'' a year after its historic high) who proved that despite all changes of venue, the fundamental conditions of DeGeneres's life still obtained: with every big move you make, you give something -- perhaps everything -- away.

Or sell it. DeGeneres has already unloaded the 10-acre Ojai retreat she shared with Heche from 1998 until the breakup. The next thing to go may be this house in the Hollywood Hills, which they bought together in 1999 but which DeGeneres has recently redone, in an attempt at exorcism. It is sleek and modern, with polished concrete floors, glass walls and giant metal front doors like those of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Other than the names of her cats -- Harlow and Subtle -- there are very few antic touches: just a Liberace coffee-table book and a scattering of satiric drawings by her girlfriend, celebrating the news that the HBO film of her recent stand-up concert has been nominated for two Emmys.